Inclined and Wind Shifts

So as I read the poets for this week’s reading, it was difficult for me to not see the poems in the context of pre-Columbian, colonial, and post colonial. I started to read each poem looking for these references or the lack of them. Of course, I realize that this is not a required element of amazing poetry, but for the purposes of discussion about poets of color, I am quite intrigued by this concept.

The poets from this week made me realize how, in many respects (whether poets accept this or not), we (poets) are historians. We look at the vast world around us (or the small neighborhood we live in) and we select the things we need/want to share for the purpose of a particular poem. There is so much information available to us and we can, if we want, write about that information in any form we want. Poets typically select poems as their medium. In these poems, we can make war seem like a heroic adventure. We can truthfully display a culture or exaggerate their existence on this planet (then we give it a cute name like hyperbole). My point is that this issue of placement in history and culture is important and can often be the element in the poetry that readers most connect to.

For instance, in the poem titled September 11, 2001 by Samuel Hazo, I am captured by the title alone. I know this date by heart and I remember what it felt like to sit in front of the television for hours not knowing what was really happening and not knowing if people I knew were in the towers or on the plane. When he says, “The natural and scheduled worlds keep happening” I am there. I am reminded that I was getting dressed for work when it happened. That I was still in my robe – that I still had my scarf on my head and that my boyfriend (now husband) didn’t believe me when I yelled to him in the shower, “a plane just crashed into the world trade center” and he responded, “what? did you say near or into?” I don’t remember much conversation after that.

Hazo uses powerful language to describe a horrific event without mocking it or degrading it. In line 19 he writes, “engulfing us like dustfall / from a building in collapse / The day / turns dark as an eclipse.” No matter where you were in the world when this happened, you will surely agree that your life was engulfed by this event and that the world metaphorically turned dark.

In the second movement of this poem, he takes us deeper into the bowels of the moment. He describes a scene where people “downfloated from the hundredth floor” and tells us that “there where others—plunging, / stepping off or diving in tandem / hand in hand, as if the sea / or nets awaited them.

By the end of the poem, we are in day two when we all woke to realize that it did actually happen. It was not a collective nightmare. That last image of “snapping from aerials or poles, / the furious clamor of flags” sticks with me because I wonder whose flags he is referencing. I assume that because he is of Arab descent that he means those flags to be the ones Arabs may have been flying in recognition of their homeland, that they were suddenly afraid to display.

This poem makes me feel that immediate movement towards the edge. I feel an entire nation of people being pushed closer to the edge when I read this and at the same time, I feel a nation that historically has felt dominate, suddenly feeling subordinate. It’s powerful and moving and doesn’t pick sides and doesn’t try to accuse or blame or justify – it just reports with the “poet’s eye” and brings me back to a discussion we had in class about the inseparable nature of poetry and politics.

I’m sure there are many out there in the poetry critique world who found this poem offensive in some way, because the critical eye is guided by our personal politics and our background and our experiences in the world and our age and so many other factors. I’m not discrediting anyone’s opinion of this poem. I feel strongly that this piece touches on many of the elements we have discussed in class regarding poets of color – how history and poetry relate to one another, how we can identify the natural elements from a colonial/post-colonial perspective, the question of what is place, the placement of history and culture, dominance and subordination, and the center and the edge.

***I wanted to talk more about other pieces, but got carried away with this one. Maybe I will post separately about the powerful pieces from Suheir Hammad and one of my favorite poets, Naomi Shihab Nye or the poem “Pig” by David Dominquez, that made me react out loud in a quiet but crowded café filled with reading customers. There were so many in this section that I want to discuss. Maybe I will.

peacelovelight

Kiala

It’s interesting that two September 11th poems showed up in this week’s reading; interesting but not surprising considering the theme of placement historically and culturally, proposed for this week’s discussion. I started with Sam Hazo’s, “September 11, 2001,” and came to Suheir Hammad’s “First Writing Since” closer to the end of my readings.

Hazo’s piece begins with the serene loops of the hawk far below the approaching airplanes. At first I was unclear about this juxtaposition, what made the poet connect these images as we enter the poem. Both hawk and airplanes have a planned course, and exactness of execution. But the hawk looks like he is sleeping; his eyes are hungry; this is his circle of survival. I don’t fear for the creatures beneath, about to panic; it feels more like we are observing something natural and profound. Meanwhile, the airplane’s aim is “dead / ahead” (a chilling break). The plane’s eyes don’t seek out individual victims; it is in fact the opposite. It wants to see no victims, no panic, just surge forward and complete its course.

Right away, the poet/narrator begins to hint at the idea that the impact of this horrific event will be different for some. Immediately all New Yorkers are not in this together, as it may have seemed that morning when we were all running from the ash, up the island and out to the boroughs. “Inch by inch / the interruption overrules both worlds,” right here, right away, we are introduced to the idea of two worlds. What are they—New York and everyplace else? The U.S. and the countries (who may have harbored, may have birthed the tiny fistful of those responsible) that will soon come under attack? Or are both worlds within NY itself—the world of those who will weep as victims, and those who barely have the breath to wail as victims for they must soon defend themselves as the falsely accused?

Next: “We head / home as if to be assured / that home is where we left it.” Again, nobody felt safe anywhere in New York that day. We could not be assured that our building, no matter how small, was not a target. That is the meaning for most New Yorkers. For this narrator, there is the second meaning: people will want someone to blame, they will look for blame the easiest way they know how, in the faces of those around them. The police are still raiding homes of Arabs & Arab Americans in the outer boroughs this month, this September 2009, eight years after. How long will it be before one can be assured that home is safe, that it is where he or she left it? This makes we want to scream with rage!

I can’t go deeply into the next stanza because those images returned me to the continual, haunted nightmares of my New York years. I wanted to analyze this but choked sorrow keeps me staring into the screen and into the page and I see that in some ways poetry’s function is to send us to a place of visceral, uninhibited emotion. Sometimes it is not to be broken apart, sometimes it just has to remind us how to feel, how to mourn, remind us of the events we cannot forget, and that these feelings—be they personal sorrow or empathy—sprout from mirrored hearts, our hearts. Hazo’s words, “Nightmares of impact crushed us / We slept like the doomed or drowned,” reverberate through my head; these lines binds me to the poet, the poem, because I too have endured that sleep. And they remind me that this sleep is not unique to those who survived that Tuesday; No. These lines are set apart because they could be laced into so, so many other poems. And that is the emotional seal, what we must not forget.

Suheir Hammad’s poem stretched out many of the same concepts that floated through Hazo’s. But her poem moves beyond bearing witness, beyond subtly referencing the horrific profiling that crashed up against the horrific events of that day. “no poetry in the ashes south of canal street,” exemplifies the silencing that thuds down after a shock, a tragedy. The poets know they must speak, but, more importantly, they must allow silence. Later, the familiar progression of pleas, an attempt to make sense of the events: “let it be a mistake . . . let it be a nightmare . . . don’t let it be anyone who looks like my brothers.” I remember thinking let it be a mistake, I remember thinking let it be a nightmare . . . but, oh lord . . . I can’t imagine my heart being tugged so fiercely from both sides, breaking and breaking upon itself to the point of begging those final words: “don’t let it be anyone who looks like my brothers.” This is a fear we cannot allow; this is a fear that has no place in an already jarred, trauma-ridden heart.

Images that stayed with me later in the poem: the woman the narrator reaches to assist, who then swears to burn her aider’s homeland; the woman who offered the hug, at a point when mere understanding, simple camaraderie was the only thing the narrator was seeking. Also in 4, the owning of this land, the narrator’s home, in the face of the (well-meaning?) emails that the U.S. had it coming: “hold up with that, cause I live here, these are my friends, my fam, and it could have been me in those buildings . . . can I just have a half second to feel bad?” Word, Suheir. We are not our governments, though we must never stop questioning/confronting our governments. No one should be a victim. The mourning we need to take cannot be lost in the political upheaval we are about to face.

Alright, I’m going to leave it there, leave the rest up for discussion or response. I remember wondering if it was okay for me to mourn, feel victimized after 9/11, because the atrocities the attack came in response to were so clear to me. But, hold up, no excuses. Just like there are no excuses for the bombs that fell the bombs that are falling or the doors that keep getting pounded, pounded down. We’ve gotta mourn, we’ve gotta find each other to hold onto. Like Suheir says, “if i can find through this exhaust people who were left behind to / mourn and to resist mass murder, i might be alright.”

I left these poems reminded of days I often want to forget. But, more critically, I left these poems seeing a glimpse of those days through the eyes of my fellow New Yorkers, the ones who had more to mourn than I.